Bevilacqua.us

In the same park as the Time Warner Data Center and Corporate Offices is an old building now in the works of being demolished. It’s the L. H. Lincoln building that used to do leather tanning. It’s considered a hazmat cleanup as well from what I read on the web. And that the future plans might be related to the “fracking” happening in this area, natural gas compression into LNG. Which seems obvious as after the downfall of Adelphia, this town is dying a slow, painful death and would be very dead without the likes of Shell’s drilling campaign and the last of the technical institutions; Verizon, Level 3, Zito Media and Time Warner Cable.

I recently moved this domain back to my favorite registrar Gandi.net after finding out Go Daddy supports SOPA. I also discovered horror stories such as:

“for a few hours around christmas when a bunch of people were transferring away they halted transfers and tried to ask for notarized documents to transfer domains”

Unbelievable.

What really gets me is that I had to ask a friend if there were any other hidden gotcha’s to GoDaddy.com transfer system. She kindly suggested a Google search – I found this at:

http://www.lodesys.com/blog/2009/godaddy.php

I spent most of the weekend cleaning up outside. Mostly due to the fair weather. Today I decided to venture South to explore the Austin, PA area. First stop, not but a few miles from where I live is Austin Dam.

I was kicking myself after getting onto the dirt road to the park when I realized I left my camera at home. Along with my compass! So, for now, I’ll try and explain it. The Austin Dam is ultimately a ruins site where a large river dam used to be. It’s four or five huge concrete walls in ruins in a huge canyon. There is no describing it in words or photos as far as I know how. It’s epic.

I then ventured into the Austin / Keating’s Summit area. An area surrounded by thick forest. I’m going to have quite the time exploring these areas via backpack.

Good day

After hearing my transfer to Coudersport was approved, I attempted to find a rental. I pulled all available resources and none, except one, was able to come up with a result due to national gas company’s “fracking” in the area and renting out to them to workers. Green-minded people should think about this. Trust me, I do.

Pam @ Trails End Reality came through for me in ways I never expected. I will be purchasing the land and home through them at some future point. The only other realtor in my life that was as generous as this was Tony Alcaro at alcarorealestate.com.

I’m renting this house from Tracie and Stewart Gordinier. It used to be Stewart’s Mother’s place. It’s utterly incredible as far as rental houses go.

Most people don’t understand why my goal in life is to live in the deep Northern mountain country. I’d love to be able to explain it in a paragraph. But even if I was able to, there is no point. This is where I love life most.

Strangely, it took me years to achieve what most people in this area take for granted. Conversely, I’m sure some would say I did the same. While growing up in Philadelphia, I had no idea how amazing that place is, in the fullest extent of the meaning of amazing, until I started to explore other places. Yes, the people there are mostly assholes, but the cultural dynamics are like nothing else on the east coast. But that’s another post.

So, where am I? I’m in Coudersport, PA. Yah. You’ve never heard of it. I can honestly say it’s in the middle of nowhere. In between Erie and Mansfield and North of Altoona. They call this area the Twin Tiers. The Northern Tier of Pennsylvania and the Southern Tier of New York. It’s embedded within the Endless Mountain Chain and resides near the Allegany river. It’s an incredible place.

From this point forward this blog will be about technology and my life in the Twin Tiers. I look forward to every moment.

How to NAT a wireless LAN and a wired LAN in Ubuntu:

Configure your wlan as you normally would.

Install dnsmasq which will forward your local DNS to wired clients:

apt-get install dnsmasq

Manually configure eth0 without a gateway in NetworkManager to 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 (or a free subnet) using this local ip also as your DNS setting.

Reboot then check with ifconfig to make sure it is correct.

Then configure the NAT as follows:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

This should work immediately. Attempt to connect to a host from another wired host.

Note: Local computers connecting via eth0 should be configured manually and use 192.168.0.1 as their DNS and Gateway

——————–

To automate, simply put this into /etc/rc.local

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE

Uncomment the line “net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1″ in /etc/sysctl.conf

Your NAT will persist after reboots.

So, I have an Ubuntu 10x laptop that I want to run as a Synergy Server. Setup is actually quite simple, but don’t follow the docs for GDM or .xsession as they will fail. What you want to do is, as your user, go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications and add the following:

Name: Synergy Server

Command: /usr/bin/synergys

Comment: Synergy Server

On login, this will read your ~/.synergy.conf which in my case looks like:

mbevilacqua@mb:~$ cat .synergy.conf

section: screens
	mb:
	mb0:
end

section: links
       mb:
         right = mb0
       mb0:
         left  = mb
       end

Debian alternatives is a system that allows you to choose your favorite applications to be called by default from many other programs. Even if you install VIM enhanced, it will be linked to VIM.basic in alternatives. The trick is to set vim.basic for each alternative you want linked to it. This fixes commonly used programs such as visudo and crontab -e to use VIM.

To do so, run update-alternatives –all and set the programs you want to vim.basic.